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The Science of Humor
Hugh Pickens writes "The sense of humor is a ubiquitous human trait, yet rare or non-existent in the rest of the animal kingdom. But why do humans have a sense of humor in the first place? Cognitive scientist (and former programmer) Matthew Hurley says humor (or mirth, in research-speak) is intimately linked to thinking and is a critical task in human cognition because a sense of humor keeps our brains alert for the gaps between our quick-fire assumptions and reality. 'We think the pleasure of humor, the emotion of mirth, is the brain's reward for discovering its mistaken inferences,' says Hurley, co-author of Inside Jokes: Using Humor to Reverse-Engineer the Mind. With humor, the brain doesn't just discover a false inference — it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. For example, read the gag that's been voted the funniest joke in the world by American men. So why is this joke funny? Because it is misleading, containing a small, faulty assumption that opens the door to a costly mistake. Humor is 'when you catch yourself in an error, like looking for the glasses that happen to be on the top of your head. You've made an assumption about the state of the world, and you're behaving based on that assumption, but that assumption doesn't hold at all, and you get a little chuckle.'"
Now, this is funny: Wenn ist das Nunstück git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput!
Big Brother is Watching You.
Don't expect any replies from the German readership.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/jokes.cognitive.txt
My German's a bit rusty, but so far I get that this joke includes a nun who is stuck in John Mayer in some fashion. Then a dog does something with pancakes.
I need to hear the rest of it so badly./p.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
Monty Python - The Funniest Joke In The World
Humor is when you catch yourself in an error
But The Funniest joke in the (english speaking?) World reckons that people from different cultures find different styles of humour to be more/less funny.
So there appears to be a conflict here. You'd expect everyone's brain to be wired to catch the same sorts of errors or false inferences, yet if there's a cultural component to humour that contradicts the "error" theory.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
This makes sense in the context of something I've noticed: the more extreme and deeply-held your views, the less likely you are to have a functioning sense of humour. In particular, hard-core religious people seem to have none whatsoever. If your dogma is so entrenched and rigid, then you aren't going to make self-correction and ambiguity a strong part of your mental tool-kit.
Never trust someone without a sense of humour, kids.
(Of course, too much can be a bad thing, too, at least insofar as maniacal giggling whilst ripping your still-living victims organs out can be considered humorous...)
Would you like a slice of toast?
What, did Randall run over your dog or something? All you do is sound like you have a grudge. I really do pity you if you have this much vitriol against people just because they read a webcomic because it entertains them. And as for the "ancient jokes", did you ever think that maybe people find them funny because they can relate to them?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Except possibly the German fans of Monty Python.
According to Google, the translation is:
If nunstück is git and slotemeyer? Yes! Beiherhund or the gersput flipperwaldt!
Hilarious.
yet if there's a cultural component to humour that contradicts the "error" theory.
Indeed. Vast categories of jokes make fun of a group (different race, different cultural background, certain hobbies, certain lifestyles, etc.), including this one by the way. The stereotype this plays on is "hunters are stupid rednecks who shoot first and think later". Hunters would probably find the joke less funny but probably the "researchers" didn't define a category for them, so it didn't how up on their stats...
I didn't expect the Spanish inquisition!
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our chief weapon is surprise! Surprise and fear, fear and surprise. Our two main waepons are...
I'm sure you know the rest :)
All the same, I'm not surprised at the North Americans not enjoying puns. They seem to like "long" stories either. Too much phoenetic spelling gives rise to less attention on the basis of the words, although with the Canadians, it is a little surprising.
A comedian friend of mine has said that although Irish, UK and most European audiences will take delight in a story style joke, the Americans have to be forced to understand that *short line delivery* it's a joke, laugh now.
Perhaps there could be quiite a few psychological studies undertaken on why "Americans and Canadians preferred jokes where there was a strong sense of superiority".
If it bends its funny. If it breaks its not funny.
Plus words with K in them something something....
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
The reason we don't see it so much in the animal kingdom is two-fold:
1. We're lousy observers, bringing our presumptions with us;
2. There's fewer opportunities.
To make the claim that it's rare or even non-existent (in other words, you don't even know) with zero proof (and something that's contradicted by observation of animals at play or interactions of animals and their owners) is just plain junk.
That feels like a different kind of humour - not at one's own expectations being subverted, but at an Other's perceived shortcomings being exploited in a status re-affirming way.
Would you like a slice of toast?
If it bends its funny. If it breaks its not funny..
Baloney. The breaking is funny too, if it's broken well.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die. -- Mel Brooks
Get off my lawn.
Am I the only one who noticed that the 'funniest joke' wasn't all that funny... then read the rest of the article and wondered what they'd cut out to get the 102-word joke down to less than 80?
Just what could be in those 20-something words to make the joke so much funnier?
“We don't allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here,” says the bartender.
A neutrino walks into a bar.
My dog watches Seinfeld but I don't know if it's for the jokes.
If you think humor or "mirth" is rare or missing in animals you haven't been paying attention, or you're too concerned with your colleges accusations of anthropomorphism.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Google has a special filter which prevents translating dangerous jokes like that. You should be happy, Google just saved your life.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Forwarding/referencing/reposting xkcd comics is a way for a large minority of socially challenged people to express themselves in a way free of normal societal constraints. In other words, it's nerd humor, and there's nothing wrong with that. The Internet has given lots of small-but-passionate groups a voice.
anyone who has spent any time in an academic or laboratory setting would've seen years, or even decades, ago.
Oh, so you are a hipster of computer science. Interesting!
Apple users and xkcd are one in the same? Seriously? I'm in the first camp and don't get the second camp at all. I think the two are mutually exclusive, unless there's some sort of strange hybrid "I find SQL injection on my Mac to be funny" personas out there.
der uber whoosh
rewriting history since 2109
Americans tend to vote their jokes into public office.
rewriting history since 2109
It is likely hard to test how humorous animals are as their mimic is hard to rate or nto at all. E.g. a raven who has just stolen the food of another raven, hiding behind a bush and watching the other raven upset jumping around the hiding place. If you see how the watching raven is behaving you get easy the impression he is laughing his ass off. However without a brain scan we can not "proof" this (providing we can figure where the humour center / laughing center in bird brain is).
I mean every few years we get surprised by some research that says: figured that a lizard can learn under wich cup the reward is, and that every mistake of choosing the cup leads to a longer waiting time for the next "test + reward". Doh, so an animal with a brain of the size of to rice corns can learn.
With birds, especially doves, they made experiments about counting and simple arithmetic. You have two bowls with a few grains. And a switch that can be activated with the peak of the bird. The test is to let the bird peek on that switch as often as the sum of the two bowls of grains are. The birds learned that pretty fast. One particular case is this: the dove stopped in front of the switch. It had figured it either has miscounted or miscalculated. So it went back to the bowls (now empty) and repeated the pickings in each bowl and "calculated/counted" again. Then it activated the switch successful.
Or you now about this parrot, where a researcher taught a few hundred words? The parrot started to correct other parrots when they practiced "speech". He could understand and make simple english sentences, like "I want to go into the garden", "Give me apple".
My assumption is that most live is able to learn, a smaller amount is "intelligent" to a certain level, and a smaller part is so intelligent that it also has humour. The question is more: why is everyone neglecting this and assuming that we humans are unique?
Another story: a cat is proudly prancing on the top of a roof. It slipped and avalanched down the roof into the roof gutter/rain pipe. After it landed it hid in the gutter for a moment (5 - 6 seconds) then it carefully stuck its head out and watched around: "did someone see me?" was written on her forehead. When she was sure no one saw her she continued to "prance" along the rain pipe ... if she had no humour, how can she be felt ashamed of falling down the roof?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
How do you make a duck soulful?
Put it in the microwave till it's Bill Withers.
...apparently this started as a real 911 phone call from a 'Dick Cheney'.
A man spends the first half of his life accumulating stuff, the second trying to get rid of it all.
Somebody got paid to do a study any Henny Youngman era comedian could have told them the result of.
I think the two are mutually exclusive, unless there's some sort of strange hybrid "I find SQL injection on my Mac to be funny" personas out there.
Speaking just for myself, I find an SQL injection on your Mac would be hilarious...
Work like no one is watching. Dance like you've never been hurt. Make love like you don't need the money.
Sorry that I don't know the author, but I've found much wisdom in those few words. Perhaps it explains why puns and double entendre(sp?) are so popular?
No, a rickroll would've been entertaining. Instead it was an SNL sketch.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Ah, you're no fun. You are no fun at all.
The rest of this is addressed to all readers except poster of parent, an intellectual whose greasemonkey filters will hack the hell out of these words and leave them bleeding all over his viewing screen.
My favorite xkcd is number 312 which needs no apology (sorry xkcd, but R.Frost would have approved of it). Of course you have to know a bit about an American Poet Laureate, have at least a nodding acquaintance with Lisp, and understand the role that DWIMNWIS has played in the perlish philosophy. Just finding a way to connect all three of those different realms together is hilarious in and of itself; to do so in rhyme, meter, and parody is over the top.
Generally speaking an xkcd strip is not funny of itself, but provokes laughter by demonstrating some kind of weakness in one of the intricate mental structures of our day. So naturally it can only be appreciated by those who remain open to continuing their education. Which leads to another humorous gem:
Definition of an intellectual: someone who has been educated beyond their intelligence. -- A. C. Clarke.
Will
print " duck" * 102, "marriage!"
I would say that my cat's schtick of frantically crying and scratching at the door to be let in and then casually sauntering away when I open it would qualify. She usually does this at least three times before consenting to enter, and seems quite amused by the whole thing.
"No matter where you go, there you probably are." -- Buckaroo Heisenberg
Well, let's see.
Do you mean this joke:
Q: Two goldfish are in a tank.
A: One says, "Do you know how to drive this thing?"
That definitely has a loser: The person being told the joke is made to think "fish tank" by the context presented by the teller of the joke, and then is ambushed by the teller of the joke specifically by being made to know they were thinking incorrectly -- it's a military tank. The laughter comes from the listener when they realize they were wrong; from the teller at the realization of the listener they've been had. Dominance and submission, both.
Or did you have another "two goldfish" joke?
I just gave you one (abbreviated, but pretty obvious.)
Ever see a cat hide from another cat or dog, smack it on the head when it wanders by, and then "run away", but using very high leaps that aren't effective at distancing instead of the ground covering-speed they are actually capable of? That's an ambush, with a victim, delivered as social one-uppance, but clearly below the threshold of actual violence. Dominance. That's humor, straight up. The laughter *is* the "run."
Dolphins not only ambush and prank, they laugh at the victim's discomfort, too. Ask any dolphin handler. It can be pretty rough humor, too. Like, broken-bone rough. That's more of a reflection of just how powerful an animal they are as compared to humans, I think -- the same jokes on other dolphins wouldn't result in that kind of damage. They'll pull you under when you're swimming, spit water in your face, all kinds of dominating pranks.
Parrots... those are considerably harder to explain, as the behavior is, in fact, linked with their use of language, and that varies enormously by the individual parrot. I'm going to punt and say you need to live with one. They're bloody hilarious, though, believe me.
Dogs... they exhibit a wide range of intelligent behaviors (as do cats, for that matter), but as far as humor goes, just play "throw the stick" with one that hasn't been trained to fetch, and see how easy it isn't to get the stick back, and how the dog will tease in the manner of "I have the stick, here, it's almost in your reach, whoops, you're too slow, aren't you?" Straight up dominance, you're the victim, sub-violent. If you enjoy being teased, then we have submission as well (though note how quickly being teased gets old... submission is a hard place to maintain cheerfully.) It's humor.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
"We laugh so we may not cry" - Roger Ebert
"So, in sum, what are we? We are the creatures that know and know too much. That leaves us with such a burden again we have a choice to laugh or cry. No animal does either. We do both, depending on the season and the need." - Ray Bradbury (Something Wicked This Way Comes)
This cognitive scientist seems to me to be only looking at a specific type of joke - the sleight of hand ones. He doesn't seem to account for the dark humorists - guys like Kurt Vonnegut, Danny DeVito, Bobcat Goldthwait or Woody Allen - who confront their audience with things that are so sad that all you can do is laugh so you don't cry. He also doesn't account for why people laugh for joy (or cry tears of joy). In Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction A Man Without a Country, he does a great job of analyzing humor and it doesn't require cognitive science (I went to grab it but realized I loaned it to a friend).
Some other things that need to be accounted for: Why people with Asperger's syndrome tend to lack humor or have very strange senses of humor. Why does my friend's wife consider all my favorite comedians to be offensive and unfunny (how can anyone not enjoy Robin Williams' stand-up?) and I consider her sources of comedy to be banal and unfunny? We were watching Bobcat Goldthwait's World's Greatest Dad, for instance, and my friend and I were laughing so hard we had to pause the movie a couple times until we could compose ourselves. During that same scene his wife was on the verge of tears, calling us sick fucks for laughing. She thought the movie was a very sad drama! She couldn't even sit through Sleeping Dogs Lie.
Some questions are best left for philosophy and the question of humor is definitely one of them. Understanding what the brain does when a person is confronted with a humorous situation doesn't really explain why people have a sense of humor and what humor really is. All the examples here are the sleight of hand jokes, and his conclusion that they're funny because they're basically brain farts was something that Vonnegut already concluded about these jokes without studying the human brain. Then there's also toilet humor - completely unaccounted for in this guy's examples.
Vonnegut claimed this to be the funniest joke in the world, which is one of the sleight of hand type jokes this guy is focussing on:
"Last night I had this crazy dream where I was eating flannel cakes. When I woke up, the blanket was gone!"
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
Actually, they also mention that ducks makes a joke more funny. So if you expand the joke to 103 words by making the hunters duck hunters, you've added two funny traits in one step.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
rst, this has to have been written by someone who has either never lived with dogs and/or cats and/or parrots ...
In particular, they've obviously never lived with cockatiels or budgies. Those critters' senses of humor stand out to even casual observers. We have two cockatiels and a blue-crowned conure. The conure shows little humor, and considers the cockatiels pests who should be attacked at any opportunity. She has a scary beak that we were afraid of for her first month in our house. The 'tiels figured out early on that they can easily outfly her, and they torment her relentlessly. This includes picking up food that they know she likes, landing with it just out of her reach, and eating it while watching her. They know just how close they can get and still be safe. And you can see the joy on their little faces as they do this. A humorless animal would stay away from a bigger, stronger, antagonistic opponent, but these little guys clearly enjoy teasing her.
Their behavior would definitely fit into the "making someone seem silly or stupid or incompetent" classification.
Many other parrot owners can no doubt post descriptions of their pet's humor.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Vüsch.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
See:
http://www.southparkstudios.com/full-episodes/s15e02-funnybot
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Load of fucking babba.
I'll admit I do find the occasional xkcd comic amusing. Sometimes, the corresponding xkcdsucks entry is also funny. Go figure.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
According to the article the world's funniest joke is 102 words long. Also, it is claimed that jokes 103 words long are the "funniest" length. Finally jokes with the word "duck" in them also are funnier.
Therefore change "there were two hunters..." to:
"there were two DUCK hunters..."
(Not only have you now included the word "duck" but you've know made the joke the optimal length! Did I really have to explain that?)
My mother-in-law's African grey likes to sound the fire alarm when she's cooking, and calls the dog a "good boy" then laugh when the dog is in trouble. He also likes to memorize a telephone's ring and some of the sound effects from casual Flash games (to make you go looking at your screen). The last dog he used to call by name, sometimes in what I could only call by an impersonation of my wife's voice, often when the dog was on the other side of a latched door or when he had just been told to stay.
Q: Two goldfish are in a tank.
A: One says, "Do you know how to drive this thing?"
Well, I understood the joke differently. I thought the fish was wondering how to drive the fish tank, and found that funny. Never thought of a military tank.
Maybe that is because I'm from Europe, and according to the article, we have a penchant for surreal jokes?
I didn't expect the Spanish inquisition!
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition. Our chief weapon is surprise! Surprise and fear, fear and surprise. Our two main waepons are...
Not so.
When the tribunal of the Inquisition arrived in a city, it proclaimed a time of grace of about a month, in the course of which the heretics could of their own volition confess their errors with the certitude of undergoing only light and secret spiritual penances. After this delay, the inquisitors would publish the edict of the faith which ordered all Christians, under penalty of excommunication, to denounce the heretics and those who protected them. The Inquisition did not have at its command a secret police or a network of spies. It counted upon the collaboration of the Catholic people, acting in this way more as a guardian of the social consensus than as an oppressive apparatus of the State.
Upward mobility is a slippery slope - the higher you climb the more you show your ass.
Likewise, sometime the Garfield is funny as well as the Garfield without Garfield.
First, this has to have been written by someone who has either never lived with dogs and/or cats and/or parrots and/dolphins, or else is emotionally retarded; second, humor is much simpler: as far as I can tell, it is predatory -- there is always a loser in an expression of humor. Making someone, or something, the butt of a joke engenders social ordering, or status. To put it another way, at a certain basic level, humor seems to me to range from mildly to extreme dominating behavior. Try to find a joke that doesn't have a victim, or a "butt"; that's the source of even calling someone the "butt of a joke."
I'll agree about animals (sometimes) appearing to have a sense of humour. But you're wrong about jokes.
There are only three jokes - what you describe is one, or maybe two, of the jokes. You don't find it funny (and it's probably not that funny for the audience either) - but slapstick "works" not because someone is being made fun of, but because the audience either identifies with the victim and gets a shock, then relief, when they recognise the victim is not them - or they find the wordplay amusing. The first is the "phew, glad that's not me" (man slips on banana peel), the second is "wow, that took me somewhere unexpected" (witty, clever).
Humour is not something every human "gets" - some are too literal/fundamentalist (take themselves too seriously).
Everything in life can be viewed as winners and losers - sounds like you analyse too much. That's why humour is healthy.
The humour of a joke is in the ear of the listener (my apologies to Margaret Wolfe Hungerford). I think that the fact that you think to be funny you need to put someone down or dominate someone else speaks to your own character. Granted that in general people tend to group together and look on those outside the group as outsiders. It is documented human nature. This does lead to this kind of 'alpha' humour and it isn't unusual in most places in the world. But it isn't the only kind of humour, and is relied on more, much more in some places than others. I find American humour relies more on put downs and domination than other places, and this seems to be accelerating. But I don't think that all American humour relies on it. I like Steve Wright and his humour, and I don't see many of his jokes making others the butt of a joke. Bob Newhart did great stand up comedy with little if any put down humour. As an example of humour where others are not the butt of a joke, even though not American look at the movie 'The Full Monte'. It was funny as hell, and I didn't see a mean bone in it. Mind you, even with the name of the movie I don't think we saw any bone in it. (See what I did there!?) And there are a ton of other great movies and comedians who don't rely on meanness and put downs.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
There's a famous story about the African Grey parrot Alex. One of the researchers was cooking a Cornish Hen, at which Alex exclaimed "Oh No, Paco!" (Paco being another parrot). Upon being told it wasn't Paco, Alex then laughed in a very human style.
We would play a game with my grey where we would touch his tail and say "Got yer tail!"
On day my wife walks past him and he pecks her butt and says "got yer tail!" and cracks up laughing.
Mostly they are like living with a 3 year old. One with a very sharp beak that likes to chew things.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
Are those european goldfish or american goldfish?
I am not a robot. I am a unicorn.
I crack myself up all the time.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
I read it like that too. But I'm from Belgium that might explain it .
Slipping shoelaces ?
That's just the victim's failure to understand the joke even after it's been made obvious. Making them all the more the victim. " Did you tell so-and-so the joke?" "yeah, but he didn't get it. Sad."
There's no humor in the idea that they're in a bowl. You can't drive a bowl. There's no alternate cognitive mapping. It's pure linear thinking; not funny at all. But there is dominance in relating a joke someone doesn't get. That's part of what jokes are about. There are only three kinds that I am aware of: one where the victim is the person being told the joke, like the goldfish joke, or where the victim is in the story itself, or where both are true vis this generalized "location" joke (you can swap the locations to any two locations to localize it):
An older couple pulls their car into a full service gas station in [A]. The attendant comes over, asks "fill 'er up"? The man behind the steering wheel says "yes, thanks", while the woman in the passenger seat says "Eh? What'd he say?" Driver leans over, speaks loudly, "Asked about filling us up." Woman: "Oh." So the car is filling up, and the attendant wanders back to the driver side window, asks the driver "Where you from?" Driver: "We're from [B]." Woman: "Eh? What'd he say??" Driver leans over, loudly informs: "He asked where we're from." Woman: "Oh." The attendant, catching on that the lady is very hard of hearing, ducks his head down to the driver's window and in a low, conspiratorial tone says "I was in [B] once... had me the worst lay of my entire life." Woman: "Eh? What'd he say??" Driver leans over, speaks loudly: "He said he knows you."
That joke manages to victimize the woman, the listener, and place [B] in one short story.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh, believe me, I know how important phrasing is in comedy. "Gives her one" works very well in British English:
An attractive young women goes into a bar and asks for a double brandy. So the barman gives her one.
An attractive young women goes into a bar and asks for a pint of beer. So the barman gives her one.
An attractive young women goes into a bar and asks for a double-entendre. So the barman gives her one.
"I'd give him/her one" is a common way to express the desire for sexual congress in colloquial British English. This is why the joke is funny. Although now I've explained it, it obviously isn't any more.